Aside from Laurence Weiner’s Dewey Square mural, A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, the best public art I’ve come across in Boston lately is something in the basement of Goodwill in Davis Square, Somerville. There against the back wall…
Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez is well-known in the Boston area for her curatorial projects and individual works in photography, installation, and more recently, performance. Atenea (2001), her mural-sized collage now on view at the Mobius Gallery, masterfully unites the themes of self-portraiture,…
Joseph Beuys’s installation Plight is a synesthetic experience. The abundance of telltale felt suffocates the reverberating acoustics of the space forming a visual tension with the piano. The tactile give of the material absorbs rather than deflects. This imbues…
Precise gestures offer a sense of familiarity — perhaps the shape is a common character in Chinese. The stems must be an abstraction of language. Does each stem mean a different word? Do they mean anything? How do we…
A print sheet. Informal, in the rhetoric of photographers, a behind the scenes glance. Sharpie on the images. Is she editing or playing? She dives to the ground, over a line penned in after the fact. A line that…
At first, I was struck by the geometry of the space in the picture. The bright spotlight holds the walls accountable for its mystery. Rectangles and triangles descend upon each other. A void forms between the two halves of…
A drawing, mid air. Magically floating just off the ground, with a shadow gracefully leading back up the wall. Stand for a minute, and the pins will wink at you, suggesting sparks from the fire that once turned this…
Cadmium beauty. There is something luscious about red. This one in particular. It is so pure and vibrant that the addition would only diffuse its impact. Dumas slathers her composition in it. That bright cadmium jumps forward so aggressively…
Looking at me, it is obvious that I am a young African-American woman. Some may see pride behind the firm position of my lips, others may see that I am a person who is always looking, looking deep into…
The lines are made of yarn, carefully and precisely establishing invisible walls. The planes cut through our space. They prepare an odd, triangular room for us. Navigate me, they say. Come, question me. Respect my negative space, even as you…
Philip Guston’s pictography forms an intimate coded narrative. This style (for which he is known) only emerged late is his career and life, and feel sincere and autobiographical. Guston’s appropriation of the style of underground comics is a crude…
I want to believe in ghosts. I want a trace to dwell in the intimate places of someone’s life after she has died. I want these spaces to in some small way to always belong to her; for emotions…
Vulnerable, confronted with the camera. The girl knows this is her moment. This is her time to show the world what she is. But the moment comes and she doesn’t know what to tell us. There is a void where…
“I can’t do people,” they say. The detail in a face is too much, the stakes of failure are too high. We rest incredible power in a facial expression — the tilt of an eyebrow and the height of a…
What does a tree look like? A child defines it like a lollipop, a green mass perched on top of a sturdy trunk. As we grow older we acknowledge the sinewy link between that trunk and its branches that support…